The Consequentialist's Birdcage
by Fondued Jicama
Summary: Her hands can't keep a gun from shaking and her legs won't bear her weight. Faced with a desk-job promotion and a probable career in inspirational speech-making, pieces of Shepard's self-worth start crumbling away. Thane offers the only steady ground he has-his persistent belief in what remains beneath the wreckage of a soldier. Shepard/Thane, post-war AU. Possible trigger for DV.


As Shepard dresses in the other room for her Alliance awards ceremony, the rustle of shifting fabric overlays her occasional choice word.

Thane watches the evening light fade through their full windows as he waits. Dozens, perhaps a hundred, memories of her spread out from this moment, like threads he can pull on. In his mind's eye he sees her half-sitting on the dresser, cupping each clasp of her uniform in her curled right hand and threading it through with the left, day after day. It's a collection of memories of her pulling punches against her god. A narrative of her struggle, if he views it objectively. Easier said than done.

She'll never lead a squad again, doesn't expect to and would never ask. What she will ask for is the _Normandy_.

Thane sincerely hopes it will be granted, for both their sakes. Working with the human military is a temporary position that leaves him restless. The Alliance doesn't particularly want him. Most of them don't trust him, which is a sensible reflex.

For now he can be patient. Shepard's still tethered by injuries and red tape and incapable of going anywhere for long. The more time she spends in one place, the hotter the spotlight gets. He's burned by it, too, the longer he stands beside her.

Kahje is where it's worst. Their networks are still widely isolated since the extranet infrastructure fractured at the end of the war, but enough leaks out for him to know he's become something of a celebrity. That's a burden he was never trained to carry.

The Primacy has chosen to grant him accolades. Of course.

They've sent him robes to wear at the ceremony tonight. They're symbols of respect with only one purpose: to be worn in the presence of members of the Primacy.

He'd recognized them on sight, though many people wouldn't. Kahje, so protective of its inner ways, prefers to confer honors in private. It appears he's somewhat of an exception. It wouldn't be the first time.

What the Primacy will be forced to do now that they've publicly recognized him is a burden he'll have to shoulder, one way or another. Perhaps it's a way to atone. Just when he thinks he's come far enough to offset the years of nothingness, the voids he's created, it settles back into his heart as a weight that only lifts through constant pressure. It's only by watching Shepard that he has any concept of where to start.

He's collateral to Shepard's fame, but there isn't a shred of remorse in him for the path he's chosen. Amonkira treads lightly and takes narrow ways.

* * *

When she steps into the hallway at last, she's a splashing riot of color backlit and framed by the open bedroom door.

The long-sleeved dress she's in is one he's never seen. It's military in presence, sensual in cut. Catching her eyes, he bows his head slightly and gives her a broad smile. "I'm impressed."

Shepard laughs, pleased. "When you paint the marionette bright enough colors, nobody notices the strings," she says, ruefully, and smoothes the fabric down along her thigh. Rigid planes surface beneath her touch, like wreckage on the ocean. The tension in the movement reveals the plasticarbon brace that's held her knee together following its losing fight with a two-ton beam in low-grav. More surgeries, a cybernetic joint replacement, could fix the issue, but for now she's still a mess.

Still just outside the bedroom, Shepard stands in front of him like it's nothing. Her body leans just enough to bring one of her shoulders in contact with the moulding of the door. It's a delicate act hardly capable of making a fool out of him.

He steps across the grey tiles of office carpet, and reaching between them he twines his fingers with hers. The edges of her nails catch on the underside of his hands, where the scales are softest. "You're missing something," he reminds her, gently.

Shepard follows his glance downward and her mouth hardens into what he recognizes as one of the many forms of human cynicism. "It doesn't really match the dress, don't you think?"

Thane sighs and lets go of her hands. He folds his own behind his back. "I could carry it for you," he offers after a moment, already knowing her answer. Weakness haunts her in the shadow of her victory like death coming to collect.

Her huff of throaty laughter takes him by surprise. She leans back against the door frame and crosses her good arm over her chest, her hand gripping comfortably against the curve of her brace. It's an odd, intimate gesture, but it doesn't soften the set of her jaw.

"And have people think I'm incapable of carrying my own _cane?_"

Thane blinks, and for a moment there is a memory and it shimmers in the stillness of one breath to the next. _She leans against the fish-tank, her features washed in blue, and her eyes are absolution. "Maybe it's madness, but you make me feel like I can _do _this_."

He has seen what she can carry—

He makes his decision before the memory has faded. He won't do this to her. In his mind, in another time, she's still wreathed in blue light, reaching for something beyond herself. He knows why she wants to walk without help, and he knows why she'll take assistance from him where she won't from a cane. He holds out his hand and hopes he's right.

She takes a step, and then another, and links her good arm through his left one. The weariness in her eyes falters and fades. She threads her hand into his and squeezes it.

"Thank you," she murmurs against the ribbing of his cheek.

* * *

He escorts her as a chaperone — or a bodyguard, an ironic term in light of his former occupation but one that increasingly suits him — until she presses him away outside the main cathedral doors. They're framed by stonework on the edge of crumbling. Somehow, impossibly, bombardments that leveled the heart of the city failed to unseat this relic that's obviously lifetimes past its prime.

There's a great wall of sound behind the doors that rolls outward into the massive courtyard in muffled waves. It's almost time for the processional doors to open. He should make his way to the front before they do, but instead he looks back in hesitation.

Event handlers are checking the omnitool hookup to the mic system and making fussy fixes to Shepard's appearance. He watches their progress with detachment. Professional-grade makeup only hides superficial damage; how much more useful it would be if it concealed how the muscles in her thigh still catch in ways they shouldn't when she moves.

From across the sea of handlers, Shepard meets his eye. He has a moment to catch a gesture he can't repeat, a wink, before she returns to the job at hand. Something soft and understanding slides from her face before she turns, and he knows it was for him because of what replaces it.

She laughs over something he can't hear, completely at ease. He reminds himself that she hasn't lost her sense of awareness. While her body language is relaxed, the reflexes that made her successful are right below the surface.

Out of nowhere, Thane feels a grip on his elbow. He coils against the touch and pivots, one hand bent at the palm, but the tension bleeds from the instinctive movement almost immediately—it's a turian's hand, three-fingered, that drops hotly from his elbow almost as quickly as he can turn.

Garrus stands in front of him with his hands raised just a fraction.

"My apologies," Thane murmurs. "It appears I'm somewhat distracted."

Garrus makes a shrugging motion that brushes off any need for a response, and then he cuts to business. There's something uncomfortably incisive about his look. "Worried?"

Thane glances around them and up toward the high rafters. He's already been through the cathedral a dozen times, covered every inch of walking or crawling space, offered security and exit strategies. "It would only take one clear shot."

"There aren't any," Garrus says immediately. "You know that. We both do. Massani and I've rigged this whole place so that if anyone even thinks about getting a good sightline from up there—" he jerks his head toward the upper supports, "—they'll blow off half the roof."

"I prefer being proactive to relying on sensor lines," Thane replies, not bothering to mention he also prefers it to blowing up cathedrals.

Garrus's mandibles shift in a dry half-smile. "Suit yourself. I put that system together, and _I'd_ rather not go crawling through it."

He clasps Thane's shoulder, a little hesitantly this time. His eyes are sympathetic. "Look... we're supposed to go in there and trust people we don't know, people we've never worked with, to be competent _enough_ at their jobs to have our backs. To make sure nothing bad happens. That's only a step above flipping a coin, and I don't think you believe in fate any more than I do. So, if it makes you feel better—" Garrus digs into his suit pocket and pulls out a slight, burnished metal cylinder. stun grenade. "I doubt you could hide much in your, uh, clothes. But I happen to know Massani coded the weapons scanners to let several of us through with items the Alliance and council might consider... _tacky_ for honored guests at a peaceful event."

Thane takes the grenade from Garrus's hand and makes it disappear into the folds of his robes. "Tackiness hasn't prevented me from carrying an SMG."

Garrus pauses. Bright avian eyes flick up along Thane's outfit. It's a brief assessing glance, if one that's somewhat hesitantly, morbidly curious. He shakes his head. "I'm impressed. But I don't want to know."

"Shepard has her carnifex," Thane adds, helpfully, as they pass through the small side doors and down into the roar of the main hall.

"I _really_ don't want to know," Garrus replies, and any teasing response Thane might make is drowned into indistinguishability by the masses.

* * *

He watches her enter the room from the live feed that's pouring into his omnitool. Even though he's turned toward the back, he's too close to the front to see. Spectators pour from their seats and flood the aisles, blocking sightlines and traffic. He has to rely on technology instead.

The screen projected along his arm is small, fed by cameras high up and almost directly above where he's sitting, but it's enough to see the way she _freezes_ as soon as people begin screaming her name. Their hoarse cries of triumph sound only inches from desperation. Pleas of the desperate have haunted her dreams for at least as long as he's shared her bed.

Suddenly she pulls free of it, shakes off the thing he can't quite know, and pushes forward to be swallowed by the crowd. A surging sea surrounds her completely. It makes way by inches, drowning everything in the broken chant of her name—voices that rumble and click with sounds beyond what translators can catch. The room swims with heat generated by the press of so many bodies. Sweat-smells pour sticky and pervasive into the air, humans and asari and batarians, the musk of elcor, a hundred synthetic fragrances both sharp and bitter.

He sees her pick her way slowly. Hard flashes of joy hit her face when she catches sight of people she knows. Bodies part for her arm to press through and take a hand or squeeze a shoulder. Some of the people she stops for are familiar. The vid on his feed is a little grainy, but he makes out reporter Al Jilani, Captain Kirrahe, Lieutenant Sanders.

Shifting forward onto his toes, he can barely see the crown of her head. She's nearly made it to the diplomacy section, where the crowd is thinner and less frenzied.

He looks at his feed. She's walking slower. More and more often she looks toward the floor.

She stumbles.

Somehow Shepard manages to steady herself before her misstep draws attention from the people around her. The cameras aren't so merciful. Dispassionately they broadcast everything she does, not that it does her much good. Even if the greater audience has seen what he sees, there's no way anyone could get close enough to help.

More importantly, she wouldn't want it.

To his left, one seat in, Liara has her eyes on her own screen. Brows tight with worry, she leans toward him so he can hear. "She isn't going to make it." Her voice is barely a whisper over the crowd but it slides down his back like ice. "I'm going back for her."

In spite of what the thudding in his chest demands, he vehemently shakes his head.

"Thane. _She's going to fall._"

He stills her with a hand on hers before she even starts to move. Her eyes lock with his. Full of determination that speaks to the sacrifices she's made and the power she holds, he knows she's a fire that will burn long after his has gone out. "I'm asking you to wait," he says through the roar, squeezing her hand.

After a moment she nods, once, but the lines don't smooth away. Still wrapped in his, her warm hand tenses in reaction to what they can both see on their screens, and to what they can't.

Shepard has reached the section for C-Sec officers. Commander Bailey stands right at the edge of the row, silent and unperturbed like a statue in a storm. He waits for her to come to him and then pulls her into a tight hug. Unexpected, it makes her face light up with surprised laughter.

Suddenly a flash of movement diverts Thane's attention: a drop in the sea of Citadel blue is shoving through the ranks toward Shepard. It's _Kolyat_. Several officers give a shout that's little more than a shape their mouth takes as he shoulders them aside. They reach for him, only seeing a body moving with intention they've been trained to intercept, but he ducks below their hands.

Reacting to the tension around her, Shepard twists her left arm toward her mid-back, but Kolyat comes into her field of vision before her fingers can slip below the full drape of her dress. With a jerking nod, she motions for the other officers to let Kolyat through.

It's hard to see, precisely, what happens next. Kolyat bends toward her ear and says something she really doesn't seem to like. When her mouth ruches like this, tight and furious, it often precedes a bloodbath.

Kolyat doesn't budge. He's on the defense, arms crossed in front of him, a spectacle of broad shoulders and indifference.

Restlessly Thane shifts his weight from one foot to the other. The feed doesn't carry audio. He'd pay a considerable amount to hear their exchange, and yet, even without a clue as to what's going on between them, the sight of her glaring up at his son makes him proud of _Kolyat_.

Fifteen seconds pass, perhaps twenty, and then the impasse breaks. Shepard steps forward and it seems like she expects Kolyat to step aside, but instead he turns and edges sideways alongside her. For a moment Thane wonders if he's simply determined to get in a final word. It isn't until the crowd parts that he sees the flash of Kolyat's hand hovering open-fingered over her elbow while they walk together.

Kolyat isn't holding her up. He's barely touching her. But by standing slightly in front of her and to the side, the crowd parts for him first, giving her more space.

"Is that what you were waiting for?" Liara asks, close to his ear. He turns toward her, confusion tightening his features, and as she looks at him her question transforms into a smile.

He feels her hand press against his, once, and then she lets go. "I'm glad he's your son," he hears her say. For the briefest moment he has to look somewhere else.

Irikah's child, with Irikah's mannerisms.

Raised by a full family, minus two. Still not too broken for a good life.

Two faces he knows finally break through above the crowd, inching forward down the aisle. His fingers dance along his arm, turning off the vid, and he waits for them to reach him.

* * *

When there's three meters to Thane's seat, Shepard touches Kolyat's arm and gives a little nod. Without a glance or word in Thane's direction, he steps from her side and slips back toward the other officers. She continues on her own.

The people surrounding her now are friends. They step into the aisle to support her, Garrus and Jacob, Miranda, Samara; their hands light on her shoulders. In the guise of congratulations, they keep her standing. Jack's hand at her elbow, Wrex's at her back, she makes it to Thane at last.

Thane raises shaking hands and greets her in the formal way. Patterns from his fingertips dance over hers. Immediately she turns her own hands up, leans against him for support, and signs back, but her hands don't know how to sign what he's doing. Light catches on her painted nails and turns them into points that flash against her dark skin. She uses the lover's greeting instead.

"You have a stubborn son," she says right into his ear, wrapping her arms around him in a fierce hug. Heat pours off her like it does during a fight. Under her perfume, she smells like war.

He's enveloped in a crisp moment of silence between one breath and the next. She cuts right through, washes off gilded empty honors and years of blood.

Her forehead rests against his. It grounds him, brings him back to the vaulted old space where voices rise and fold in on themselves, echo down from above, rise again. "You know everything I could say," she whispers, and he knows their moment's ending.

A soldier serves the people; she taught him what that meant. Now, in victory, she extends her duty to healing and hope. Arashu chose well. _Thousands at her bidding speed and post o'er land and ocean without rest_—

He pulls away and savors the image of her worn face. "Thank you," he manages. His voice catches, lets go of the words roughly. By miracle they aren't lost to the crowd.

Leaning forward, she lets their lips meet. With care, she takes jerking steps up to the dais to do what's required of her.

_They also serve who only stand and wait._

* * *

War takes all. Water presses in, silences the struggle. Deafens in its stillness. And yet, spilling from this room — through faulty connections, tenuous extranet buoys, current-time omni-tool feeds leapfrogging from hotspot to hotspot—life rushes out and out and overtakes the empty sound, a flood reversing its course.

It isn't about her, not really. She's only the cipher, and it leaves her empty when it goes.

* * *

At the close of the night, they take a cab to their understated Alliance apartment complex, and when it pulls away they're alone. It's an appropriate time. The ceremony was long and the reception longer. Exhaustion hits them hard, and Shepard hardest. Thane takes slow steps as she struggles with the last few steps to the foyer door.

The fourth time they have to pause, he considers lifting her like a piece of luggage. The arm around his waist shakes. Earth-brown fingers twist furiously into his silk robes.

If she were anyone else, he would've picked her up five yards ago—when she'd begun _dragging_ her right foot instead of raising it. The detached voice of his training echoes in him and urges action. Without conscious thought, he searches for any glint of movement from the timid bloom of new steel buildings some blocks away, or for footsteps on the quiet street.

He hears someone whistling to his right. Their assured footsteps are military. Most likely they're headed to the complex where Shepard stays, a five-story building stuffed with offices in its civilian life. Now it's stuffed with Alliance soldiers.

The soldier isn't a threat, but it's better not to linger. Thane's lips are close to her ear when he speaks. "Let me carry you," he murmurs, in a plea as much for his own sake as for hers.

Shepard shakes her head, once, abruptly, her breathing still harsh. "Just get me inside."

She steps away from his supporting grip. She might as well be stepping off a cliff; he does the only thing he can, and follows.

Once they're inside, the foyer door cuts off the night. Recycled air seals around them as it pressurizes. Shepard stumbles and veers sideways into the wall. His hand is still on her elbow: with swift, almost brutal force, he uses what leverage he has to push her elbow against her body in one motion and pin her opposite shoulder hard against the wall in the next. Her brace makes a whumping sound as the length of it smacks the wall through her sleeve.

"_Fuck,_" she manages to spit. Her head's bent down. She slams her bad hand against the wall and cries out through clenched teeth.

The stillness in the room pounds in his ears and it's a few moments before he hears her shuddering attempts to breathe over the sound of his own heart. A trickle of sweat follows the column of her spine until it disappears into the pooled curve of her dress, darkening it from pomegranate to something Thane can barely see, an almost-color indistinguishable from shadows.

Shepard's still leaning heavily against the wall, and it isn't easy for Thane to move around her without forcing her to take all her own weight. Cautiously he untangles his legs from hers, and then he slides his hands down to her hips so he can hold her up along her center of gravity. He's able to turn her toward him until her back rests firmly against the wall.

At last they're face to face. With almost clinical precision, he notes the blotchiness in her cheeks. It's a human trait and it means pleasure and embarrassment and pain.

Suddenly Shepard's hand is pressing against his chest. Startled, at first he thinks she's pushing him away. He's caught off guard when he realizes she's responding to _him._ He's humming: not the human sound, but the crooning rumble he and Irikah had used to lull Kolyat's fussing. It starts somewhere deep under where Shepard's thumb is rubbing and carries through the curves of his ribs. Her hand chafes in gentle half-arcs over his skin and the feeling flicks through him with a jolt. He can't stop staring at the movement of her thumb.

When he lifts his face up at last, when he meets her eyes, her tears have slowed. Lines frame her mouth, up toward her dimples, downward toward grief. Suddenly she leans forward, away from the wall. He lets her wrap her arms around his neck, and then he bends slightly and picks her up.

Shepard is heavier than she looks. As he carries her through the quiet foyer and toward the lift, the heavy-tensile carpet muffles his burdened steps. Pressing the button for the elevator, he waits.

As it descends to the lobby, candid laughter leaks through the closed door. It opens on a couple of privates first class and a corporal shoving at each other and giggling like a group of fools; looking up, they freeze in place. Horrified shock pulls the skin tight around their white eyes. Suddenly they're nearly tripping each other in their haste to disappear, rushed _ma'am_s floating half-voiced on the air as they go.

Shepard, head more or less over his shoulder already, keeps her face turned fixedly away.

When at last he steps with her into the coolness of the front hallway and carries her to the bed, her eyes are hooded lamps in the light from the hallway, framed by dampness he has a weary urge to kiss away.

Instead, he helps her with the zip on her dress and tugs it out from under her thighs and up over her shoulders. When he unbuckles the brace around her knee, she lets out a hissing sigh of dismay. It's ugly, swollen like it hasn't been in months.

As far as surface injuries go, they've both patched up far worse things in the field; it's only that this swelling covers a mess that will never heal properly on its own.

She wants to try. Doesn't want to ask for a hundred-thousand credit surgery, one they'd likely insist on doing for free, when resources are so tight everywhere.

Having stood on the other side of that argument, he understands.

He gets a cold-pack from the freezer and hands it to her, climbing into bed behind her and wrapping the comforter around them both. Soon they're both warm, except for around her knee. The blankets absorb the chill and spread it to him.

Shepard's voice breaks the silence, husky, wavering, like she's trying to squeeze the sound out while drowning. "I thought... I thought I was ready for this. That I could manage it."

"You _did_ manage it." Emotions far more powerful than patience rise and perch, querulous, on his tongue. He bites them back.

"I _managed_ to set myself back another month, at the very least. I _managed_ to shuffle like an invalid..."

He's learned to keep anger out of his voice, but even he can't always hide it in his eyes, and he's glad she faces the wall and not him. For a protector and upholder, sometimes she has no concept of the acid in the things she says.

"Do you think it would have mattered if you'd been in a wheelchair?"

_With every step she takes toward the doors as she leaves, another row rises to honor her. She passes him, and as he stands he is one drop in the sea. He's part of an immense rustling wave, cresting backward row by row, leaving silence in its wake._

He brushes her hair to one side so he can kiss her neck, which smells unpleasantly of adrenaline and ammonia and feels clammy from sweat. She sighs in response, turning her head slightly to one side, but the hand tucked beneath his left arm tightens further into a fist. She's struggling to talk. He feels the tendons in her broad clenching jaw against his cheek.

"It isn't about them. I know it isn't fair. I know I should have walked, hell, _strutted_ out there with a cane, as if I didn't give a fuck what anyone else thinks. The damnable thing of it is I _don't _and I still couldn't do it. I thought about how pissed it makes me that people think, you know, being _stronger_ means you're a _better person..._"

As her voice wavers higher and trails off, Thane feels strong fingers reflexively curl and uncurl against his side. He tries not to tense beneath them.

"I hate being weak," Shepard adds at last, quietly. As though he hasn't overseen buildings rendered to cinders just to hide her shortcomings.

She begins to pick at something on the underside of the blanket. He feels her hand as it moves. The blanket, pinching downward, puckers more forcefully by the second.

Suddenly, like faultlines shifting between his arms, she breaks.

"I hate that fucking cane. It's like slapping a pat of medigel on a headshot, one more pointless bandage to cover the fucking mess I'm left with, to remind me of all the things _I can't do_. It's bad enough that the man who fucks me has to follow me to make sure I don't fall in the bathroom, and—_break something_ when I'm trying to take a shit." She's crying now, a rough awful tempo, breath soughing out and catching on itself. Hoarsely she says, "_Christ._ Just go."

He pulls away from her in deliberate silence. Even the sheets slipping down his legs and the popping of his joints as he moves sounds unbearably loud. An intrusion on their terrible intimacy.

When he leans away to draw back his feet, he catches a glimpse of her face in the light. She turns it from him with a little jerk. Her cracked lips tremble and some instinct in her won't let him see it.

He's tempted to withdraw entirely from the room. In some ways it would be more merciful to leave her in the dark with just the sound of her breathing and the final click of the door as it closes behind him. The couch would be suitable for a stiff night without sleep. A suitable place for waiting. She'd have to come out sometime.

Pieces of a person stay when they are left behind. The strand of a lifetime sustains itself in memories, but there is something more: the body remembers; _places_ remember. How Javik sees the world is only an outward affirmation of that fact.

The resentment in this room is enough to poison it.

He turns back toward her, long years burning under his skin. How are some things mended? Even in her, where despair and shame freeze sharply and then thaw in forgetting...

Their bed dips beneath him as he climbs onto it once more. He faces her, on his knees. Snot drips from her nose in a trail that follows the contours of her lips.

When he speaks he says protected things he'd never meant to say.

"It isn't about what you can't do, Shepard." He drags out her formal name, meeting the force of her tone with the full brunt of his own frustration. "I don't doubt you'll walk again. I'm afraid you'll see it as a _personal failing_ if you limp. You _say_ it angers you that the strong are valued above the weak. Are you an exception because you're an object of your own fame? Or are you naturally this cruel to everyone who fails to live up to _the pinnacle of your expectations_—"

There's a second's warning and it's enough time to know he has two options, to let it happen or to flip her violently onto the floor—

Shepard's left foot slams into his waist and nearly wipes him from the bed.

He lies where she's put him, with his head draped over the edge, and wheezes around the throbbing that floods from the crest of his hips to his ribcage. He's had worse from her, but never on their bed. It's something to think about as his body fights itself for air.

Coughing, at last he rolls onto his side.

"I'd tell you to get the fuck out," he hears her rasp, reasonably, like they're having a mutually winded conversation over dinner. "But I don't think you can." He watches her shift sideways, and, leaning forward, she presses her little scarred hands over his thin robes, against his ribs and stomach, feeling the contours like a field medic. Abruptly, she stands and hobbles toward the nightstand, where he knows the cane is leaning.

"You'll live," she says. Her cane clicks against thin carpet as she heads to the door. "I'm getting a fucking drink."

* * *

With an extraordinary patience that's more mechanical than felt, he breathes around the hot discomfort in his chest and stands.

_There_ was an exchange that could have gone better.

He finds her in the living room, on the couch in her underwear. With hesitation, he goes around to the other side of the couch and perches on the armrest. His feet prop lightly on the cushions below.

Light from an automated streetlight floods through the windows and catches the heavy bell-curve of her eyelids. For a moment they look startlingly drell. The effect's dispelled when she turns toward him, and whatever surging familiarity he thinks he sees is lost. What's left is familiar in its own sturdy way. Strange, impractical curves over hard edges, skin that's pliant and prone to stretching and sagging, a contentious and brittle ego.

"You've been patient with me," she says, frankly. Her eyes slide from his. "What I've never understood is _why_. It's borderline manipulative. You shouldn't put up with any of my shit. I wouldn't."

"I'm not 'putting up' with it," he says hotly. It's insulting. It implies he's being abused. "I'm not here out of obligation. Don't mistake my presence for pity."

She snorts, leaning back a little, hands curling and uncurling around the rise of her bent good knee. "You never say anything about it. You just let me... push you around."

"Is that what you think?" One of his eyebrows takes on an incredulous downward pitch. "The galaxy pushes you hard enough. If I haven't wanted to add my own weight, that's my prerogative. I've weathered worse things than your temper," he adds dryly, "no matter how highly you rate your own significance."

Shepard sighs, pulling her knee tighter, her lips compressing even further until all that's left is a white line. "I kicked you."

"You did," he says evenly. "And if I hadn't cared about dislocating your hip, you wouldn't have."

She just barely stops the roll of her eyes. "I don't care. It doesn't matter if you let me or if you could still beat me even when I didn't have a shitty leg. I _hit_ you, Thane. I won't let you justify it just because I'm a mess."

"It isn't justified. That doesn't mean I'm justified if I try shirking responsibility for triggering it."

She bristles and shakes her head: "that's _no_ excuse—"

"It isn't," he repeats. Bending down toward her, he reaches out and covers her foot with his hand, rubs his thumb along the inward curve. It twitches away when he reaches the arch. "While I was training, my instructors forced me to confront a painful truth: that there are consequences to my actions. In my case, those consequences were usually someone's death. I don't carry the responsibility for what they required from me, or for my training. It's still worth noting that I've never been ignorant of the cost." He pauses. "And if you can't learn to control your temper, there will be consequences."

Her foot slides away from him; she pulls her leg closer to herself. In a raw tone that's trying to be anything else, she prompts him for a response. "Such as?"

"You'll hate yourself," he says simply.

That's all it takes. The hard line of her mouth wavers and she looks away. The motion exposes the pillar of her neck. Her throat bobs as if she's swallowing words, and those are the ones that cut him.

In a quiet rustle, he slides down onto the couch and lifts her feet into his lap, mindful of her bad knee. Her legs, her feet, are still as cold as always. Picking up where he'd left off, he chafes them under his hands, warming them.

When she gives a little appreciate sigh, he looks up. She's looking at him oddly. Her brows pulled together in a candid line, a sort of supplication manifesting itself as a truth she isn't choosing to hide.

He's well-aware he undoes her through his little acts of mercy. It's the only ground she ever gives.

"In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud," he quotes, looking toward the kitchen in a nonchalant way that's meant to ease the weight of his gaze. To give her time.

It takes her a moment. She finishes: "under the bludgeonings of chance... my head is bloody, but unbowed."

"Correct." He says. Scrutinizing the fridge, he allows himself a smile.

* * *

It's not quite morning, and the room is growing cold. Standing, he helps her up after him, and the way she rises with her hand bent in his reminds him of dancing.

She hesitates, and then she reaches out and touches his arm, tugs at his robes. "All decked out in highest honors and you never said a word. I suppose you didn't want me to know." Sighing, she squeezes his shoulder. It's with her bad hand and it comes out more as a pat. "Liara told me your government might have plans for you, just as a heads-up, though frankly I'm consistently disturbed by how she knows when I _don't_ know something just as much as when I _do_."

She pauses, swaying a little on her feet and shivering, slightly, from the cold: "I feel like I have to ask. Whatever the Illuminated Primacy wants... it's nothing under the table?"

"No, siha," he says, amused that she seems to believe they'd have any interest in dropping resources on someone his age, all matters of honor and ended contracts aside. "Considering my current company, I'm too high profile for the majority of my... skills to be of any use to them. There are still a few small things I suspect they've considered, espionage, for instance, though they'd never ask for anything illegitimate now. I won't know until they make official overtures."

What they'll bring to the table is almost entirely contingent on her. It's a wonder to him that she can't see the pull she has on entire _governments_, let alone on one life, on his. He finishes, slowly, "If I must hazard a guess... diplomacy. A Consul, perhaps. Hopefully not ambassadorship."

Little flashes of a wicked something tug at the corners of her lips, a fight between a joke at his expense and sobriety. Face smoothing into seriousness, sobriety wins. "And if someone goes digging?"

"The Primacy will protect their reputation," he says, an answer that requires no elaboration.

She finds the armholes in his robes and slips her hands in. Her hands, her fingers, are so cold it makes him jump, and her throaty chuckle falls warm against his chest. "Ambassador Krios. It has a nice ring. I'll take it."

"Stop," he huffs exasperatedly. "Consul would be unfortunate enough."

Dark, keen eyes meet his, and she touches one of his elbows before withdrawing her hands. "Let's go to bed. We'll worry about it when it comes. And whatever happens..." she looks down, flushes a little at the bareness of optimism: "we are the masters of our fate."

Making a sudden clumsy half-pirouette toward the couch, she reaches for where her cane leans against the armrest. In reaching, she finds his hand instead.

He waits for the Captain to straighten, for the weight of her body to shift against his, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, and then he walks with her.

-end-

* * *

There are two poems referenced here - the first is "On His Blindness" by John Milton (_they also serve_...), and the second, "Invictus" by William Ernest Henley (_under the bludgeonings of chance... we are the masters of our fate_).

While I started this way back in July (!), I didn't have a clear sense of what I was trying to say until I saw this poem (philosoverted dot tumblr dot com /post/63029777781) on tumblr:_ Instead I will watch you as you bandage yourself, and mend all your bruises, and wear your own scars_...

Lastly and _most_ importantly, I owe a huge deal to my beta, quietonewisp, for her invaluable second pair of eyes. Without her I would've sounded like a philosophy textbook. ;) Thank you for your insight and gentle direction!


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